Shane Nichols

Journalist, including four years at The Australian, and 20 at the Financial Review. Wrote on defence, IT, tax, investing and more. Editor in Port Douglas (retd)

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@FredPawle @belladabrera @joshxhowie @GBNEWS She’s totally correct. Teachers are the problem.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@Napoleon_Chron A demon, a wrecker, and a psychopath responsible for carnage and death everywhere he went. Glory? Non. As usual the Anglosphere and a few other europeans had to clean up the mess.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@SandyXiaotong Parroting the lines he’s been taught. Deflecting at Olympic level. What a weasel. Thinks he’s a skilled professional politician. A straw man.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

It’s so difficult when you hear retarded comments from relatives or friends which give you clarity into their absurd, illogical and deluded worldview.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@brivael France is so deluded and dangerous. And to think so many Aussies died and are buried there, in 2 wars! For what? This useless “nation”. Arrogant, solipsistic as a people, ignorant, entitled, lazy and envious. I lived there for a while.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@brivael Trump was right to can USAID. I’ve been to Geneva twice in 2 years and saw the mindset around the UNHCR what these scamps get up to for their own benefit. The mischief, and free money.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

I’m surprised to discover that Bose Ultra Gen 2 earbuds sound better than my Bowers and Wilkins Pi8 and Apple Pro 3. AND of course its noise cancelling is superior to both. Apple’s ANC comes 2nd but Pi8 sound better than Apple.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.

Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.

Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."

First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.

Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.

Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.

Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.

Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.

That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.

The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.

Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.

That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.

And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.

So why do so many people hate capitalism?

Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.

They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.

Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.

People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.

The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.

Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@BMAU000 I think it’s likely an aggrieved constituent who feels she let him down personally. But we’ll see.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@nfergus I lived for a year in Paris in the 1980s. There is very limited social mobility. Very little competition in the economy — people hand down jobs , even menial ones, to their kids. They put up high silos around their particular job until it resembles a racket. Class ridden. Envy.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@ChrisCamillo Point number 2 is so important and true

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@BarackObama Oh, so there it is — community organiser. The same back door, highway to hell career path as you know who.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@SkullSpeedDeal FFS, is there ANYTHING in that idiot’s life that’s normal?

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@confrontfr How long before another Bastille and hordes of criminals are let out? Gangs must be having a party already in this chaos.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@HeyShobhan @lorenzofl0w Chuck Berry too, for the same reason

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@DrewPavlou Somehow this bloke IN A WHEELCHAIR got to migrate here.

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@DrewPavlou Lol. His special needs protection umbrella isn’t going to help now! Amazing how this foreigner twerp got elected in the first place, like so many greens (ie, Reds).

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@PattonAmy @Prince_Nuels So?

[Shane Nichols @Shane___Nichols]

@OcarinaJones @News24Aust Aw. There’s no special needs umbrella over you now, is there pal?